This book was inspired by an antique broadside titled “El Mundo al Revés” a late 19th century print I saw years ago while traveling through Spain. These old prints illustrated entertaining scenes showing the world’s natural order in reverse. One of the latent functions of these prints was to remind people of the proper order of things by showing them in reverse.

This book is a custom handmade clamshell box containing all 10 relief prints accompanied with 10 letterpress text pages of fables, bilingual Spanish-English. (8.5″ x 8″ x 1″) The pages are not bound but freely stacked in order of image, then fable etc. so that the text page can be held and turned in the direction of the preferred language, to exemplify the theme of the book and the physical act of “turning upside down.”

I first carved high density rubber blocks, hand printed them, then created a digital file to make the polymer plates for printing the edition on a press. The text pages were run 2 color through a letter press. Master Printer Brent Bond of Santo Press printed this edition. I created the images first, and then worked with author Ilan Stavans. who wrote fables in this book.

Typically books are bound at the spine, but in this book the pages are free floating. The viewer chooses their preferred vernacular to read it in either Spanish or English.